Been watching over the recent surge in fediverse users for about a week now. Last week, it was climbing what i would call naturally, organically. Now for the last couple days, its been like 350k in the last 2 days.
Love to see the growth of users, but these have to be bot created accounts. I dont want this to be bot infested community. I see the value in bots when used correctly, but lets be real - general population and bots could ruin this community.
Is there anything planned? Is there work from some third party to throw off the “stableness” of Lemmy / fediverse?
I think some of it comes down to admins who left their (small) instances open (no captcha, no application, no email validation) not knowing how bad an idea that currently is given the maturity level of Lemmy and the (very recent) influx of bots. I am reaching out to the admins of the fastest growing servers according to FediDB if it looks suspicious (based on growth rate, participation rate of their users, and if the content posted by users). In many of these cases we are talking thousands of new accounts in the past few days on instances that have single-digit active daily/weekly users.
So far the responses I have gotten have been appreciative and the admins are taking action, but not everyone has responded. Also the tooling to find and delete such accounts is pretty lacking as far as I can tell.
Not all heroes wear capes. Awesome job!